A Step Behind

“Once we were so close friends, but for now we are just……”

This is the most common line often said by people when they just remember about their close relationships of past. Well, I think it is the most painful lines told by the person about the relationships.
I found that in many of the relationships people just make habits of living with each other, spend whole day talking with each other. Even now days as there are plenty of services being provided by various tele-communication companies at cheap rates, young generation talks through SMS and many more services for whole day, share all of their feelings and emotions with each other, get a great emotional and mental support from their friends. In fact it becomes so tough to live or imagine even a single day without your friend…but suddenly things get changed and people often accept this as a ‘distance with time’ or things associated with long distance relationships and many time people just don’t even bother to maintain their relationship status up to that level.
People often say that ‘I am busy in my life and he/she will be busy in his/her life and I am not getting time to talk to my friend”, but slowly this duration increases, from day to day, from day to month and then it becomes just as to make a call on birthdays and on some other special occasions. Some of the people say that “he/she is my friend and I will contact him or her when I‘ll be in need of my friend and my friend would also do the same if I would be needed.” But I ask to all of them that “was it the status of their friendship when they were close??? Were they friends for the sake of being friends just in need?? I don’t think so. Neither you know about what is going on in your friend’s life nor does your friend.
There is word called ‘priority’ which according to me means a lot for maintaining a relationship. If you wish to be in continuous touch with your close friend, you would definitely get time to talk to your friend within at max. 3-5 days, whether you are the busiest person of the world or you have plenty of free time (mind it, I am not saying that you must talk to your friend in 3-4 days but you should not blame ‘time’ only for not being in touch with your friend). But people generally keep this thing out of their priority list and slowly lose their friends.
It becomes most awful situation that one of the friends finds himself in a problem but is unable to talk to his friend because the latter is too much busy in his life or finds that my friend is not having a time to listen me and finds him/her unapproachable. He lives in agony, does not find a friend of that level of intimacy and other person fails to feel the twitch of his friend, pre assume that my friend would be fine. This thing brings debacle changes in friendship.
Sometimes now as your closeness level is decreasing, your friend starts feeling uncomfortable when you concern about his/her problem, does not want you to intervene in his/her life and finds your suggestions as quite intruding. Then you would have to move “a step behind” which creates a silence and unseen gap between both of you and here your friendship starts changing into formality.
So now after seeing all these things, I find that being emotionally numb is quite better than to be trapped by emotions. At least you would not go through the pain of missing friends, pain of maintaining formal relations with your close friend, which for me is one of the most painful moment and it is really tough to get over it.
Friendship is more of feeling than saying, its all about reading b/w the lines. If once you make someone as your close friend then you must feel that when your friend is actually in need of yours and what is going on in your friend’s life and your friend must also feel the same. Yes, there may be some gap as you both get so much busy but that gap must be momentarily, it must not be changed as a duration or gap for a life time. You must understand the situation of your friend but it should not be up to the level that there is decrease in importance of your friend and you always find an alternative of your friend.
So dear friends, please do not let your friendship become formality, life is a punishment without friends. It is not easy to maintain that closeness level with everyone (for me it is impossible). Please never let your friend go such that it becomes so late.
PS: One of my friends asked me that “Why you titled it as “A Step Behind”? I don’t find any relevance of it with this article”..I then told “after maintaining that closeness level, if you would have to move a step behind in your friendship..then generally it does not remain as a step only..it leads to annihilation of your relationship and your friendship tends towards a formal relationship…so this article is all about that how this single step (deterioration in closeness) annihilates your friendship”